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- Volume 18, Issue 2, 2020
Radio Journal:International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media - Volume 18, Issue 2, 2020
Volume 18, Issue 2, 2020
- Editorial
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- Articles
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WhatsApp audios and the remediation of radio: Disinformation in Brazilian 2018 presidential election
This article brings the results of an investigation into the role of WhatsApp audio messages in the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections, proposing that instant voice messaging borrows elements from radio language. We started from a broader research, conducted by the Brazilian National Institute of Science and Technology in Digital Democracy (INCT.DD, in its Portuguese acronym), which identified a network composed of 220 WhatsApp groups – all of them with open-entry links – supporting six different candidates. Those groups put together thousands of anonymized profiles linked through connections to similar groups, configuring an extensive network. More than 1 million messages, including 98,000 audios, were gathered and downloaded during 2018 Brazilian electoral period (from June to October). We focused on eighteen audios with major circulation (totalling 3622 appearances) among the ones shared at least 100 times, which were extracted and analysed. The use of radio content analysis techniques pointed out strong evidence that audio messaging remediate radiophonic elements such as intimacy and colloquial language to accelerate disinformation campaigns.
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Radio studies beyond broadcasting: Towards an intermedia and inter-technological radio history
Authors: Maria Rikitianskaia and Gabriele BalbiExamining radio development over a long time span from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, in this article, we claim that radio history is broader than the history of broadcasting only. We suggest looking at radio history through the perspective of intermediality and inter-technology, drawing on five different examples: radiography, radiotelegraphy/radiotelephony, radar and satellites, radiomobile/mobile phones with regard to radio spectrum and packet radio networks, such as Wi-Fi. We demonstrate how and why these (and other) technologies should be considered parts of radio studies even though they do not represent classic examples of radio broadcasting. Overall, this intermedia and inter-technological perspective on radio history offers new ways of rethinking and reformulating the confines of radio studies, as well as contributes to a greater field of media studies.
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Scripting the radio interview: Performing Desert Island Discs
More LessDesert Island Discs reveals much about the BBC’s early approach to the radio interview. The radio programme calls for its audience, the host and a ‘castaway’ to engage in a fantasy where guests are invited to preselect musical records to accompany them on a fictional desert island. This concept acts as a vehicle in which the host asks questions or makes statements about the significance of these records, in order to unearth the private motivations of a public figure. This has proved itself as a predictable, reassuring and innovative format that all parties must commit to. This article addresses the first decade of the programme, where all interviews were scripted. Studying the origins of this series allows us to cast some assertions on the ways that scripting was used to communicate and mediate a host’s persona and an interviewee’s past and personality. The use of scripting was intended to create a sense of informality, humour and theatrical drama. Contextualizing these types of scripted exchanges further informs our understanding of the radio interview within our mediated cultural heritage.
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Radio and media history as a methodology for conviviality
More LessThis article illustrates how research into the history of radio and media can become a methodological ‘tool for conviviality’ by discussing my research into the very low-powered Tokyo station, Radio Home Run. In 1986, Ivan Illich visited Radio Home Run to participate in a programme that not only exhibited characteristics of his concept of conviviality, but that was also partially inspired by this concept as well as his critiques of industrial society and institutional life. During this programme, Illich sat on the floor of a small Tokyo apartment – the station’s make-shift studio – to share food, drink and a microphone with members of the station as he discussed his ideas with those in attendance. About five years prior to his visit, early members of Radio Home Run and its predecessor Radio Polybucket had been inspired by the writings of Illich and other progressive thinkers to develop their own theory and practice of radio-making, which they described as narrowcasting. They implemented this theoretically inspired practice throughout the station’s tenure (roughly 1983–96) both discussing and demonstrating conviviality with Illich during his 1986 visit. In 2016, 30 years after Illich’s visit, I met with former Radio Home Run members to collect oral histories, facilitate group interviews and conduct archival research about the station and its practices. I implemented a methodology that combines traditional practices of media and radio history with practices of art history focused on the perspectives and accounts of creators, such as those advocated by Lucy Lippard and Kristine Stiles. As I travelled throughout Japan to sit, share food and drink and discuss the past with groups and individuals, I experienced what it was like to participate in Radio Home Run’s convivial practices of narrowcasting. I also participated in the collective reconstruction of Radio Home Run’s collective history by documenting conversations as members pieced their memories together and revisited material from their personal archives, which shed new light on the station and its convivial practices. This article discusses and reflects upon the convivial nature of my research experiences in order to propose a methodology of radio and media arts history research that can serve as a methodological tool for conviviality in the present and the future.
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Listening while doing things: Radio, gender and older women
More LessThis article investigates the role of radio in older women’s everyday lives. Based on interviews with listeners in Britain and Germany, it argues that patriarchy structures women’s radio listening into old age. The women who participated in this study accommodated their radio listening to their role as housewives, deliberately choosing content that does not distract from their work and making sure they do not invade their husbands’ space with radio sound. Across their radio day, older women move in and out of different forms of listening, characterized by different levels of attentiveness. They enjoy radio as background noise to domestic labour, but they also use radio as a resource for identity work and a critical engagement with gender politics.
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Radio drama as art and industry: A case study on the textual and institutional entanglements of the radio play The Slow Motion Film
More LessThis article argues that in order to obtain a deeper comprehension of the radio play as a work of art, one should complement the dominant method of textual analysis with industry analysis. This argument is illustrated by means of a case study on the 1967 Belgian radio play The Slow Motion Film. This radio play is an adaptation (in fact, a re-adaptation as there had been radio adaptations in 1940 and 1950) of the innovative theatre play The Slow Motion Film (1922) by Herman Teirlinck. In order to explain the creative choices of the radio play, which are largely based on the pursuit of fidelity to the source work, the institutional aspect is of great importance. The goal of honouring Teirlinck and highlighting the cultural-historical importance of his work fitted within the broader cultural-educational mandate of the public broadcaster, which prevented a more inventive adaptation. This article argues that in order to gain a better understanding of the radio play as a text, the industrial context also needs to be studied. Furthermore, this article contributes to the largely unwritten history of the radio play in the Low Countries.
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- Book Reviews
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Community Radio’s Amplification of Communication for Social Change, Juliet Fox (2019)
More LessReview of: Community Radio’s Amplification of Communication for Social Change, Juliet Fox (2019)
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 252 pp.,
ISBN 978-3-03017-315-9, h/bk, £47.23
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Revolution in the Echo Chamber: Audio Drama’s Past, Present and Future, Leslie Grace McMurtry (2019)
More LessReview of: Revolution in the Echo Chamber: Audio Drama’s Past, Present and Future, Leslie Grace McMurtry (2019)
Bristol: Intellect, 294 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-78320-982-8, h/bk, £18.72
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British Radio Drama, 1945–63, Hugh Chignell (2020)
More LessReview of: British Radio Drama, 1945–63, Hugh Chignell (2020)
London: Bloomsbury, 200 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-50132-969-2, h/bk, £86.40
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 21 (2023)
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Volume 20 (2022)
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Volume 19 (2021)
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Volume 18 (2020)
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Volume 17 (2019)
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Volume 16 (2018)
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Volume 15 (2017)
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Volume 14 (2016)
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Volume 13 (2015)
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Volume 12 (2014)
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Volume 11 (2013)
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Volume 10 (2012)
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Volume 9 (2011)
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Volume 8 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 7 (2009)
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Volume 6 (2008 - 2009)
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Volume 5 (2007 - 2008)
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Volume 4 (2007)
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Volume 3 (2005)
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Volume 2 (2004)
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Volume 1 (2003 - 2004)